Investor Shayle Kann is asking big questions about how to decarbonize the planet: How cheap can clean energy get? Will artificial intelligence speed up climate solutions? Where is the smart money going into climate technologies? Every week on Catalyst, Shayle explains the world of climate tech with prominent experts, investors, researchers, and executives. Produced by Latitude Media.
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Shayle Kann and Rob Gramlich discuss the evolving landscape of U.S. transmission infrastructure. They analyze the recent uptick in buildout, the pivotal role of FERC Order 1920, and the "tragedy of the commons" hindering investment despite immense demand from AI data centers. The conversation also covers specific projects like SPP's backbone and the Grain Belt Express, the importance of permitting reform, and promising technological innovations for future grid expansion.
This episode explores how New Mexico's Economic Development and Environment Departments are redefining government's role in fostering growth. Through a collaborative "white glove service" approach, they offer regulatory certainty, fast market access, and a comprehensive financial package, including a $65 billion sovereign wealth fund. The state is attracting significant investments in clean energy, deep tech, and fusion, demonstrating that economic prosperity and environmental protection are not mutually exclusive but can be achieved simultaneously through proactive, action-oriented governance and investments in livability.
Shayle Kann and Raffi Garabedian explore the green hydrogen market's journey through a rapid hype cycle and subsequent burst, primarily due to persistently high costs for both renewable power and project construction. Raffi explains Electric Hydrogen's innovative approach, focusing on dense, supersized modular electrolyzers to drastically reduce EPC costs and achieve fossil parity. They discuss how strategic markets, like Brazil for ammonia production, can leverage green hydrogen's economic and geopolitical benefits beyond just emissions savings, envisioning a future where green is the "icing on the cake" rather than the sole driver.
This episode features Ekin Dogus Cubuk of Periodic Labs, explaining his shift from a cautious view to a conviction in AI's potential for materials discovery. He details how advancements in LLMs, like OpenAI's O1 reasoning model, coupled with highly automated physical labs, enable a new feedback loop for scientific breakthroughs. Periodic Labs aims for impactful discoveries like room-temperature superconductors, exploring both direct product opportunities and providing AI-driven R&D services to others.
This episode unpacks the Department of Energy's directive to FERC to streamline large load interconnection, particularly for data centers. Experts Allison Clements and Tyler Norris discuss the proposed jurisdictional shift to federal authority, the benefits of co-locating generation with loads, and accelerated processes for curtailable facilities. They explore the complexities of defining flexibility, the challenges of an ambitious timeline, and the broader implications for grid planning and new energy models like virtual power plants.
Shayle Kann and Andy Lubershane discuss five intriguing questions about the future of electricity, primarily driven by AI's massive load growth. They explore the potential for the current undersupply to flip to oversupply, identifying factors like algorithmic efficiency and off-grid data centers. The conversation also highlights winners (utilities, equipment suppliers) and potential losers (industries relying on cheap power) from the AI boom, alongside the prospects for various technologies like nuclear, enhanced geothermal, and grid-enhancing solutions.
As AI demand surges, the traditional grid struggles to keep pace, driving a critical shift towards on-site power for data centers. KR Sridhar argues that solid-state fuel cells offer the speed, reliability, and modularity needed for digital-age AI factories, learning from industrial captive power models. He outlines how these solutions address volatile AI loads, accelerate deployment, offer pathways to lower carbon emissions, and are essential for maintaining economic and national security leadership in the global AI race.
Shayle Kann and Akshat Rathi discuss a range of climate and energy topics, assessing whether each is overhyped, underhyped, or just right. They delve into distributed energy resources for load growth, the challenges of co-locating generation with data centers, and critical grid bottlenecks like transmission and transformers. The conversation also explores the impact of venture capital in climate tech, the global influence of the Paris Agreement, and the future of emerging technologies such as sodium-ion batteries, advanced geothermal, and advanced nuclear.
Jamie Daggett from Ariel Green discusses how insurance bridges the "valley of death" for clean energy technologies by providing creditworthy backstops for performance guarantees, enabling faster capital flow. He details Ariel Green's products, using the Powin Energy bankruptcy as a case study to show how insurance protects projects against supplier failures. The episode also covers managing safety risks like the Moss Landing fire, policy uncertainties, and insuring emerging long-duration storage technologies, highlighting the industry's maturation in risk management.
This episode explores Base Power's innovative 'gentailer' business model, which combines retail electricity sales with owned and operated residential batteries for backup and grid services. CEO Zach Dell details how their vertical integration strategy enables them to achieve a significant cost advantage over utility-scale storage, allowing them to offer highly affordable home backup. The discussion also covers their expansion into regulated markets by providing capacity to utilities and their approach to managing workforce demands and market volatility while striving for rapid, gigawatt-scale deployment of distributed energy resources.
Following the failure of federal climate legislation in 2010, clean energy advocacy shifted focus to states and regional markets. Heather O'Neill, CEO of Advanced Energy United, discusses their new playbook to address current challenges like accelerating load growth, an affordability crisis, and federal regulatory hurdles. The strategy centers on removing red tape for new projects, leveraging existing infrastructure with tools like virtual power plants, and making smart investment decisions to ensure clean energy growth is both rapid and economical.
Shayle Kann and Dana Guernsey of Voltus discuss how distributed energy resources (DERs) and demand response (DR) have become essential for grid stability, moving from emergency-only use to daily, sophisticated dispatches across diverse customer types. They cover the market forces driving DR adoption, current growth barriers like data access, and Voltus' innovative "Bring Your Own Capacity" program, which allows large loads like data centers to fund regional virtual power plants, offering faster and more sustainable grid solutions.
This episode delves into the vast, underutilized resource of agricultural residue, like corn stover, and the significant challenges of its collection and transport due to volume and heterogeneity. Peter Reinhardt of Charm Industrial explains their solution: mobile pyrolysis units that densify biomass into bio-oil on-field, drastically improving economics. The discussion highlights biomass's highest value as a carbon source for applications like carbon removal, iron-making, and SAF, rather than traditional energy uses. Charm's success in the carbon removal market is attributed to extreme transparency and emphasizing co-benefits, attracting a diverse range of buyers.
A decade ago, distributed energy resources (DERs) were hyped but failed to deliver at scale due to high costs and a lack of urgent grid need. This episode re-evaluates DERs, highlighting how current load growth and major grid bottlenecks have flipped the market's desperation. Shayle Kann and Andy Lubershane discuss the evolution of dispatchable DERs, the distinction between demand response and virtual power plants, and the potential for DERs to finally achieve widespread deployment despite regulatory and cost hurdles.
Shayle Kann and Brian Janous discuss the growing trend of data centers colocating with behind-the-meter generation, often gas plants, to address long grid interconnection times. They critique this approach, highlighting issues like gas grid congestion, integration complexity, high costs, and underutilization. Instead, they advocate for leveraging existing grid capacity through flexible solutions like batteries, grid-enhancing technologies, and virtual power plants, arguing these are faster, cheaper, and more sustainable. The discussion also touches upon the feasibility of on-site renewables and expresses skepticism about on-site nuclear for data centers.
In this AMA episode, Shayle Kann and Lara Pierpoint address listener questions across critical climate and energy topics. They discuss the controversial nature and venture viability of solar radiation management, explore solutions for rising electricity prices, and share their updated perspectives on the Inflation Reduction Act's impact and the promising, yet challenging, nuclear renaissance. The conversation also delves into the current climate tech investment cycle, the potential and hurdles for vehicle-to-grid technology, and clarifies the nuanced climate implications of plastics.
Shayle Kann and Varun Sivaram of Emerald AI delve into the complexities of integrating AI data centers with the electricity grid. They explain how the often-misunderstood load profiles of training and inference workloads create planning challenges, and how leveraging inherent flexibility—through temporal pausing, slowing, or spatial shifting of compute—can transform these energy-intensive facilities into valuable grid resources. The discussion covers the need for new service-level agreements and the potential for demand response to evolve into daily load shifting, ultimately enabling a more reliable and clean energy future.
Neha Palmer, CEO of Terawatt Infrastructure, shares insights into building the backbone for America's electric trucking revolution. She explains how the company secured a billion-dollar investment to tackle the complex challenge of developing charging infrastructure for a nascent market, navigating permitting, site selection, and hardware logistics. The discussion highlights their innovative pull-through charging designs for heavy-duty trucks and ambitious plans for a nationwide network along the I-10 corridor, emphasizing strategic site development and optimizing energy utilization for future growth.
Shayle Kann speaks with Landon Mossburg, CEO of Peak Energy, about the growing momentum of sodium-ion batteries for stationary storage. Mossburg outlines how sodium-ion, particularly the NFPP chemistry, offers significant system-level savings due to superior thermal management, enhanced safety, and reduced auxiliary power requirements, despite a higher cell cost compared to LFP. He details Peak Energy's innovative passive thermal management system, its impressive cycle life, and the potential for establishing a competitive US manufacturing base, arguing these advantages outweigh current challenges.
This episode revisits Brian Janous's 'Watt-Bit Spread' theory, explaining the economic dynamic between data centers and the electricity market. It delves into how AI's rapid growth has made power access critical, shifting data center development from real estate to energy expertise. The discussion highlights the market disconnect where the high value of watts for AI isn't reflected in electricity prices, hindering new infrastructure. Solutions like 'Advanced Grid Tariffs' are proposed to incentivize faster capacity delivery, benefiting both data centers and broader ratepayers while navigating utility constraints.
This episode delves into the PJM capacity auction's recent record-high wholesale power prices, attributing them to unprecedented data center-driven load growth and PJM's revised resource adequacy requirements. Host Shayle Kann and S&P Global's Steve Piper explain how compressed auction timelines, conservative generator accreditation, and increased reserve margins are creating a national challenge for grid operators and leading to higher retail electricity bills. They also discuss the slow scaling of demand response despite these market signals.
This episode explores how Redwood Materials is profitably repurposing end-of-life electric vehicle batteries for grid-scale energy storage, a shift from traditional recycling. CTO Colin Campbell explains the minimal processing required, the critical role of software and power electronics, and how these systems offer a cost-effective solution, especially for long-duration storage. The discussion highlights the substantial and growing volume of available EV batteries, positioning second-life storage as a significant player in the energy transition.
Shayle Kann and Andy Lubershane delve into the complexities arising from the OBBB, which modifies the Inflation Reduction Act. They analyze the pervasive "foreign entity of concern" provisions, the uncertainty surrounding "safe harbor" rules for renewables, and the implications of differing tax credit timelines for nuclear, geothermal, CCS versus wind and solar. The discussion also covers hydrogen's extended credit timeline and the uncertain future of EV tax credits, highlighting the policy shifts' profound impact on climate tech development and market dynamics.
This episode dives into the turbulent residential solar market, marked by bankruptcies, rising interest rates, and fierce competition. Shayle Kann and Julien Dumoulin-Smith analyze the "One Big Beautiful Bill," revealing how it phases out direct consumer tax credits, favoring larger leasing companies. The discussion also covers the future role of storage and potential industry consolidation amid shifting economics.
This episode explores crucial insights from state utility regulatory filings, where Nat Bullard's Halcyon firm uses AI to uncover trends. Shayle and Nat discuss how unprecedented data center demand is swamping small utilities and forcing new tariff structures. They also delve into the significant increases in new gas plant construction costs and the broader inflationary pressures driving up retail electricity rates for all customers, alongside the overlooked role of energy efficiency.
This episode explores GM's ambitious plans to mass-produce LMR batteries by 2028, a chemistry offering a rare blend of high energy density and low cost, positioned between NMC and LFP. Kurt Kelty from GM discusses the complex journey of localizing the North American battery supply chain and overcoming historical technical hurdles of LMR. The discussion also covers LMR's role across different EV market segments and its comparison with LFP for stationary storage.
This episode explores the critical role of industrial steam, which accounts for 50% of global industrial energy, and the urgent need for its decarbonization. Addison Stark of AtmosZero explains why traditional waste heat recovery is often inefficient, instead proposing standardized, air-source heat pumps as a scalable alternative to fossil fuel boilers. The discussion delves into the technical and economic challenges of transitioning, including the "spark spread" between electricity and natural gas prices, and how thermal storage and high COP heat pumps offer viable pathways, especially when considering regional energy costs and security.
Shayle Kann and Chris Sharp from Digital Realty discuss the booming data center industry, driven by AI workloads. They differentiate between training (broad deployment) and inference (regional growth), highlighting the critical role of existing availability zones due to latency and throughput. The conversation delves into the complexities of scaling up, power constraints, extended development timelines, and the industry's navigation of "braggawatts" versus genuine demand, including the role of "bridge power."
The podcast explores the current boom in the gas turbine market, noting high demand from the electric sector, especially data centers, and the resulting increases in lead times and costs. Guest Anthony Brough explains the market's historical boom-bust cycles, the "guarded optimism" of OEMs, and the complex supply chain shared with the oil & gas and aerospace industries. The discussion also covers the impact of diverse market drivers like renewables and battery storage, and technological advancements in efficiency and hydrogen readiness.
Shayle Kann and Carl Hoiland of Zanskar discuss the evolution of geothermal power, examining its initial boom and subsequent stagnation due to exploration challenges and "dry hole risk." They break down the step-by-step process of geothermal project development, including temperature gradient holes, slim wells, and managing reservoir decline, while also highlighting new technologies like EGS and AI-driven exploration. The conversation covers current permitting reforms and the significant, yet geographically specific, resource potential of geothermal.
